The most exciting seconds in sports could come in the last lap of a Formula One race, or as the clock spins to zero and the point guard hangs in mid-air as he tries for one last three-pointer. These are examples of high tension at the end of a long sporting event, in which the excitement inevitably crests and falls. It’s not to everyone’s taste to watch more than an hour of cars going around in circles, but just about anyone finds that the final lap of the race glues you to the television and forces you to your feet.

But there are some sports that embody only that final lap, the bottom of the 9th with your team a run behind and the bases loaded; the minute sprint that decides it all.

On December 8, 2013, the world’s greatest skier stood at the start gate, on a mountain at Lake Louise, Canada, fighting Arctic conditions of -25 degrees Celsius. She looked even more like a superhero than usual, with her face covered in green bandages against the skin-peeling wind and cold.

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The world’s greatest skier, Slovenia’s Tina Maze, came in a decent sixth that day, with her arch-rival, American Lindsey Vonn, settling for 11th. German veteran Maria Hoefl-Riesch came in first. The difference between Hoefl-Riesch in first and Maze in sixth was 0.51 seconds. That’s hard to wrap your head around. It’s less time than it takes for you to read the first word of this sentence.

But for Maze, the far-and-away winner of that year’s women’s alpine ski season, the best season ever for a skier, it felt like an eternity—half a second meant abject failure. At the Sochi Olympics, where Maze further solidified her world title with a pair of gold medals, the difference between her gold in the giant slalom and Austrian Anna Feininger’s silver was .07 seconds. That’s about a quarter of the time it takes the average person to blink.

Despite the fact that America is a nation of avid skiers, professional skiing is not a popular spectator sport here. Aside from the Winter Olympics, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American, even one with a chalet on the slopes in Vail, who follows the professional World Cup ski circuit, or who could name one professional skier beyond Vonn. Though Vonn has tremendous talent, she's a celebrity more for her tabloid attractiveness and dating of Tiger Woods than the fact that she won Olympic gold in 2010 by beating her teammate, Julia Mancuso, by 0.56 seconds in the downhill event. And since most Americans are a little fuzzy on the world of professional skiing in general, it is no surprise that few could answer the question of who is the world’s best skier.

It is no surprise that few Americans could answer the question of who is the world’s best skier.

Despite Maze's triumph at Sochi and world-record season, few would recognize her as the Michael Jordan of her sport. In central Europe, however, where skiing is followed with the ravenous attention of a baseball fan in Boston, Maze (pronounced Mah-zay) is a household name. She is, quite literally, the greatest skier in the history of the sport. In 2013 she scored more points—far more points—over the course of a single professional ski season than anyone, male or female, had ever before. But because she hails from a tiny country (Slovenia, a former-Yugoslav nation of two million, tucked between Venice and Vienna), and excels in a sport with a limited viewership outside of central Europe, her incredible feat has been largely overlooked.

Maze was born in 1983, when Slovenia was a region of Yugoslavia (it won independence in 1991). She made her World Cup debut at the impossible age of 15, while the youngest skiers in the professional circuit are normally 18 years old. She leapt to dominance in 2009, with her first major victories. One of the reasons for her success is evident from watching her in post-race interviews, or even moments after she crosses the finish line. She has anything but a poker face, often near tears if she does not win. She is her own toughest critic, and seems greatly affected by atmosphere and her personal mood. Even a second-place finish can leave her bereft.

When Maze is not on the slopes, she is also making headlines: She moonlights as a model for Armani, endorses a clutch of products, and even put out a decent pop song that was viewed on YouTube 400,000 times in the first three days of its release. Her personal life, including a long-term relationship with her former trainer, Andrea Massi, has also drawn attention. But it is her efforts on the slopes that electrified her native country.

Despite its small size, Slovenia produces an astonishing number of world-class athletes, particularly in the winter disciplines. Slovenes follow Maze’s every move, her every victory making front-page headlines, while her second or third place finishes feel like gross failures. The media holds autopsies of what’s been going wrong, with each race studied from all angles, and Maze’s mood and post-race interviews combed over by guest psychologists on morning talk shows. Slovenes can be fair-weather fans, quick to hop on a winning bandwagon, or off it just as quickly, but that year, the nation was held enraptured by their champion.

Maze is one of only six women in history to have won all five World Cup alpine ski events (Vonn is another), and one of only three who managed to win all five disciplines in one season. While Maze is an all-rounder, Vonn is all about speed: she’s like a closer in baseball, striking fear in her opponents, particularly with the high, hard stuff—she’s far better at the sprint events than the dexterous slaloms. But Vonn was also injured for much of the last two seasons, and she did not participate in the Winter Olympics. It was a disappointment to fans of great rivalries, for Maze vs. Vonn is like the Red Sox vs. the Yankees.

In the 2011 World Cup season, Vonn came in second overall, and Maze in third. In 2012, Vonn came in first overall with 1980 points, and Maze in second place with 1402. Then came 2013 and Maze’s world record. Vonn won the downhill title, her strongest event, but Maze dominated in the rest of the disciplines: first place in super G, a speed event; first place in the more technical giant slalom; and first place in super combined, a single event made up of one downhill and two slalom runs. Maze finished with a world-record 2,414, eclipsing the former record of 2000 points, held by the Austrian skier Hermann Meier. To put her dominance in 2013 in perspective, the second-place finisher that year, Höefl-Riesch, managed only 1,101 points—less than half of Maze’s total. The top male skier that season, Marcel Hirscher, won the World Cup with only 1,535 points—nearly 1,000 less than Maze.

Maze vs. Vonn is like the Red Sox vs. the Yankees.

During the 2012/2013 season, everything went right. The following season was less promising, but this was largely due to the impending Winter Olympics. Maze demonstrated that she had been saving herself, taking home a pair of gold medals at Sochi. But her arch-rival, Vonn, did not participate at all, nursing an injury and, as she recently revealed, debilitating bouts of depression.

The new women’s alpine ski season is just beginning, and it will showcase the Maze-Vonn rivalry, though there are a half-dozen athletes who can match them race-for-race. There are a good dozen skiers who have a chance to come in first on any given day. Maria Hoefl-Riesch is solid and consistent; another Olympic medalist, Anna Feininger, is strong and young. Is there a rookie with the chops to challenge Maze’s record? Possibly—American Mikaela Shiffrin came in 5th overall in 2013 at just 18 years of age. If she keeps up her current level and improves over the many years she has ahead of her, than she’s got a shot.

Croatian skier, Ivica Kostelic, Maze’s friend and the 2011 Men’s World Cup winner, thinks Maze’s record is there to stay, with no male or female skier looking primed to overtake it. “I don’t see anyone at the moment [who could challenge it.] This record could be broken only if a skier performs well in all disciplines in a single season.” Between the 2013 season and the Olympics, Maze rode lightning in a bottle. Maze started this season with a first-place finish in the slalom race at Levi, Finland. This coming weekend, she will stand atop the mountain at Lake Louise, Canada once more, with Vonn squaring up beside her. With Vonn now back in play, and the competition fierce, there is every reason to tune in this winter.

If you’re a skier, or just a fan who enjoys the last lap of the race or the final seconds on the clock, then this is the season to watch skiing. The Babe Ruth of the sport will be racing this winter. Stand up in front of your TV and feel your heart shudder as Maze plunges down the slope at 95 miles per hour. It’s the most exciting sport you’ve never watched.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”